CFP: RACE AND THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA

CFP: RACE AND THE SOUTH ASIAN

CFP: RACEANDTHESOUTHASIANDIASPORA 13 th Annual SALA (South Asian Literary Association) Conference Boston, USA 2-3 January 2013 Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: SUNDAY, 5th AUGUST 2012 Labeled “Pakis,” “coolies,” “ragheads,” “heathens,” “Hindoos,” and “wogs,” South Asians have been racialized historically and across multiple geographies. As a result of forced and voluntary migrations over the centuries, they have been inserted in, impacted on and contributed to the racial economies of U.K., North America, Africa, Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, and so on. The increasing racial diversity of populations in different parts of the world demands a continuous engagement with race and its coordinates of racism and racialism. From science-driven taxonomies to contemporary sociocultural explorations, literature, film, theatre, and other cultural productions have become sites that articulate, confront or contend with multiple registers of race and continue to model new meanings. The hierarchies ascribed to colour underpin existing understandings of race as well as forge alternative discourses to study it. For the SALA 2013 conference, we seek to place as central the category of race as constitutive of the South Asian diasporic experience to examine how the “old” and the “new” diasporas of South Asians have been shaped by and/or have responded to race and racism—imperial or neo-imperial—in a variety of geographies. We invite papers on literature, film, culture, criticism, and activism that explore different meanings of race and experiences of South Asians in the diaspora and focus especially on the complex interplay between race and gender, sexuality, religion, socio-economic class, age, language, etc. Contributors may explore, but are not restricted to, the following questions and topics: How have different formulations and cultural productions of diaspora conceptualized and/or considered race? In what ways—historically and in the present—have geopolitical and global economic forces affected the reception and racialization of South Asians? How do the contested discursive practices of difference, such as assimilationism and multiculturalism, unsettle politics of identity that are couched in racialized nation-building projects? In what ways have diasporic artists and writers articulated or visualized these differences in literature, cinema, and other productions? How have South Asians responded to or positioned themselves with regards to indigenous peoples and other ethno-racial minorities? How might the intricacies related to the discriminatory attitudes towards the “other” implicate the racial subjectivities of South Asians?